Bridal Bargains

by Michelle Reid

  ‘I’m not going to be a bride,’ she mumbled from the confines of the white sheet she had pulled around her. ‘The wedding is off.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ he sighed.

  Why does he always call me foolish when I am at my most sensible? ‘I want to go home to England tomorrow,’ she insisted. ‘And I never want to set eyes on you again.’

  A small silence followed that, then another sigh to precede a rasping ‘Look—I’m sorry’ that sounded tense and uncomfortable and just damned bloody irritable.

  No grace in that apology, she noted acidly.

  ‘It was entirely my fault and I am now thoroughly ashamed of myself. Does that make you feel better?’

  To know you’re ashamed? ‘No, it does not!’ she cried, lifting flashing blue eyes to find him standing there looking as if he’d never been out of those clothes all evening.

  When in actual fact what he had done was simply replace the first lot with the same again from his wardrobe because the ones he’d been wearing earlier were still lying in a crumpled heap on the carpet by her bed where they’d landed after being wrenched off him.

  Self-contempt rippled through her as she saw herself eagerly helping him to remove them. She shuddered again, and drew the sheet more closely around her.

  ‘Just go away, will you?’ she choked, realised the tears weren’t far away, and swallowed angrily down on them. For she wouldn’t cry in front of this man ever again! she vowed fiercely.

  He went to say something, but a raucous laugh filtered into the room from the galleried hallway below, and whatever he had been going to say turned into a heavy, ‘I have to go back down there. We don’t have time to deal with this now.’

  I don’t want to deal with it at all! Claire thought wretchedly. ‘I bet they all know by now how you dragged me up here,’ she whispered as humiliation sank its teeth deeper into her. ‘I’ll be the running joke of the party by now. Have you any idea how that makes me feel?’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said tautly.

  Don’t what? she wondered. Don’t hurt, don’t feel used and humiliated—when she had every right to feel all of those things?

  ‘I hate you,’ she whispered, feeling the threatening tears burn all the hotter in her throat. ‘The deal is off. So instead of lying you may as well go and give them that little piece of juicy truth to joke about!’

  Suddenly he wasn’t looking so good either, she noted. Despite the clean skin and the fresh suit of clothes, his skin wore the pallor of a man who still was not comfortable with himself.

  But his words didn’t sound anything but grimly resolute. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ he refused. ‘Things have gone too far for you to pull out of our arrangement now.’

  ‘I was not aware that I was giving you a choice here!’ she responded.

  ‘And I am not giving you the choice to pull out,’ he coldly shot back as he began walking towards her.

  And—surprise, surprise! Claire mocked herself caustically—the ice was back like the loyal little friend it had always been to him!

  ‘So listen to me, Claire, because I mean what I say …’ He arrived by the bed, his tone deep with warning.

  She buried her face in her knees again because she just couldn’t bear to look him in the face this close to. He sighed harshly as if he knew exactly why she was hiding away like that.

  ‘Our arrangement still stands as formerly agreed,’ he grimly insisted, sounding insultingly as though he were chairing a business meeting. ‘And although I know this development has—complicated things between us slightly nothing has really changed.’

  Nothing has changed? What about me? Claire wanted to yell at him. What about the wretched change you’ve brought about in me? ‘If you don’t stop talking to me like a damned computer, I am likely to start screaming,’ she breathed in seething fury.

  He swung away from her—then back again, the action seeming to ignite his own fury. ‘For the love of God, Claire!’ he rasped. ‘I am trying my best to be sensible amongst all of this—’

  ‘Carnage,’ she supplied for him when he bit back whatever choice of word he had been going to offer.

  ‘Yes,’ he hissed, seeming to accept that this was indeed carnage—which only made her hurt all the harder. ‘But I can absolutely assure you this is not going to happen again. So we will go on as agreed. The marriage of convenience stands. I will take Melanie as my daughter. And you will still be free to get on with your own life unhindered by me just as soon as you are ready to. But if you think,’ he then added very seriously, ‘that I am going to let you break my grandmother’s heart in her final days, by walking away from our deal, then you are heading for trouble. For I don’t take defeat on the chin like a gentleman. I fight back and I fight dirty.’

  He meant it, too. Claire could hear the ruthless ice of intent threading every single word. She shivered; he saw it happen and seemed to take that as a gesture of acquiescence because he stepped back from the bed.

  ‘Now I am going downstairs,’ he announced less harshly—trying, Claire assumed, to defuse the tension simmering between them now he had made his point. ‘Where I will make a very Greek joke about temperamental females with more spirit than any poor mortal male could possibly hope to deal with. And I will see you again in the morning.’

  As he walked towards her door, Claire lifted her head to watch him leave with bitterness in her eyes. He turned unexpectedly, catching her looking at him, and she was trapped, caught by a pair of devil-black eyes that held knowledge of her no one else did. It hurt her, knowing that he now knew her so very intimately while she still felt she didn’t know him at all, even after what they had just done to each other here in this bed.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ he questioned huskily.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, and wished he would just hurry up and go so she could curl up and weep her heart out.

  Yet still he lingered with those dark eyes flickering restlessly over her. ‘Shall I send Althea up to help you—do whatever it is you need her for?’ he then offered, wafting a descriptive finger at her plaster-cast.

  ‘I can manage.’ She quietly refused the offer.

  He nodded and turned back to the door then opened it while Claire held her breath in suffocating anticipation of his finally getting out of here.

  But almost immediately he changed his mind and closed the door, though he did not turn to face her again. Stiff, tense, almost pompous in his delivery, he then had the gall to murmur gruffly, ‘I would hate you to think that I do not appreciate the—honour you bestowed on me tonight. It was—’

  ‘Will you just go?’ Claire coldly interrupted, not wanting to know what it was.

  He nodded, taking the hint. And this time when the door opened and closed again he was on the other side of it.

  And at last Claire could do what she wanted to do, which was curl up in a tight ball on her side and sob her wretched heart out.

  After the storm was over, she made herself get up, tape a plastic bag to her plaster-cast, then stood beneath the shower for long minutes, simply letting the heated sting of the water wash away the lingering pangs of emotion the tears hadn’t cried away.

  After putting on one of her new silk nightdresses, she began picking up his clothes and folding them neatly before taking them through to his room, reasonably sure she was not going to walk in on him.

  Like her own room, his was lit by only a single small lamp left burning on the bedside table. In fact, in almost every way the room was a match to hers, she noticed—except his bed didn’t look as if war had taken place in it, she thought with a small shudder as she laid the clothes down on the smooth pale grey counterpane then walked back into her own room to eye with distaste her tumbled bed.

  An honour, he had called it. She called it a waste of something so very precious and she knew there was no way she could sleep in this bed again tonight.

  Tears back and burning, with an angry jerk, she turned away from the wretched bed and walked across the room
to the soft-cushioned sofa, where she curled herself up, then closed her eyes tightly in a grimly determined effort to shut the last dreadful hour right out of her head.

  Surprisingly she slept, though she hadn’t really expected to be able to switch her mind off as easily as that. Moreover, she slept long and heavily, and awoke the next morning vaguely aware of half surfacing only once during the night when she’d been dreaming that she was being carried.

  It had been a disturbing sensation. Strangely painful though not in a physical way, she recalled as she lay there watching the morning sunlight draw patterns on the ceiling via the white voile drapes covering the windows.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ an unbelievably gentle voice echoed inside her head.

  Recognising that voice, she sat up with a start, saw she was back in her bed and knew exactly how she’d got there. It had been no dream last night! Andreas had come into her room and found her asleep on the sofa! He’d woken her up when he’d gathered her into his arms to carry her back to bed, and she even remembered the raw humiliation in starting to cry all over again!

  Oh, how could you, Claire? she chided herself furiously. How could you let him see how hurt you are?

  And there was worse—much worse, she recalled, closing her eyes in the hopes of shutting it all out again. But it would not be shut out. And she saw herself clinging to him. Saw him lay her gently on the bed then come down to lie beside her. She felt the light brush of his lips on her cheek and the way his hands had stroked her, quietly soothing her back into oblivion before he must have got up and placed the covers over her.

  I hate him, she thought angrily. I really, really hate him for catching me out like that!

  Too angry to just sit there tormenting herself, she got up and dressed quickly, needing to soothe her savaged ego by spending some time with Melanie.

  She could even make herself a drink there, since the nursery came with its own fully equipped kitchen, which would save her having to face Andreas across the breakfast table.

  The idea lifted her spirits, and as her brain fed that inspired thought to her stomach she realised just how desperate she was for some food and a hot cup of tea.

  Dressed comfortably in a sage-green tee shirt and a pair of slim-fitting yellow Capri pants, she stepped out of her room to be immediately struck by how quiet the rest of the house was.

  Early though she knew it was, she had expected the house to be a hive of activity by now as the staff cleared up after last night’s party. But as she peered over the gallery rail at the huge hallway below she saw that the place had already been wiped clean of all evidence of partying.

  The staff must have been working until the early hours, she realised, leaving them at liberty to have a well-earned lie-in this morning which probably meant that she was the only person up and around.

  A prospect that suited her very well while she was still struggling to deal with what had happened last night, and she resolved to use their long day yesterday as an excuse for them to leave her to take care of Melanie today.

  The nursery would give her somewhere to hide. Somewhere to lick her wounds and try to come to a decision as to what she was going to do. For the impulse to just pick up the baby and run before she dug herself even deeper into the mire her emotions were in was a gnawing ache that filled her brain.

  If it hadn’t been for Andreas’s grandmother, she had a suspicion she would have done it already and stolen away in the dead of night like a thief running off with the family silver.

  Also there was still Melanie to consider. Melanie who could gain so much from living this kind of luxury life—and so little from the life Claire could give her.

  Not many pluses in favour of running, she heavily concluded, and she hadn’t even taken into consideration the dire threat of retribution Andreas had laid on her last night.

  Inside the nursery all was quiet, the early morning sunlight diffused by the pretty apple-green curtains still drawn across the windows. Claire quietly closed the door behind her, and was about to walk over to the crib to check on the baby when a sound in the other corner of the room had her head twisting round, expecting to see Althea—only to freeze when she found herself looking at Andreas.

  Dressed in what looked like a white cotton tracksuit, he was sitting in the comfortable rocking-chair in the corner, cradling a sleeping Melanie in his arms.

  His eyes were closed, his dark head resting back against the chair’s cushioned back—though he wasn’t asleep. The way one long brown bare foot was rhythmically keeping the chair rocking while the other rested across its knee told her that.

  He was just too lost within his own deep train of thought to have heard her arrival.

  Not pleasant thoughts either, she noticed, looking at the grim tension circling his shadowy mouth. Then she had to suffer a vivid action replay of what that mouth had made her feel like last night and she unfroze with a jolt, her first instinct to turn and leave quickly before he realised she was there.

  His eyes flicked open, catching her in the act of a cowardly retreat. The chair stopped rocking. They both froze this time. The fact that Andreas was as disconcerted to find her standing there as she was to find him was enough to hold them trapped as a new knowledge of each other raked through the silence in a whiplash so painful it seemed to strip Claire’s tangled emotions bare.

  Neither spoke; neither seemed able to. Her heart was pounding, her throat thickening up on a stress overload that was seriously affecting her ability to breathe.

  What he was feeling was difficult to define with a man so good at keeping his own counsel, but something stirred in the unfathomable black eyes.

  Regret, she wondered, or even remorse? Whatever it was it managed to hurt a very raw and vulnerable part of her, and she would have continued her cowardly retreat if he hadn’t spoken.

  Speaking softly so as not to awaken the baby, he said, ‘Kalimera …’ offering her the Greek morning greeting that she had grown very used to over the last few days.

  Slowly she turned back to him. ‘Kal-Kalimera,’ she replied politely, not quite focusing on him.

  ‘You are up early. It is barely six o’clock,’ he remarked, trying, she knew, to sound perfectly normal but it was a strain and it showed in the slight husky quality of his voice.

  She nodded, licked her dry lips and wished her heart would stop racing. ‘S-so are you,’ she managed, but that was all she could do.

  ‘I haven’t been to bed,’ he replied, glancing ruefully at the baby. ‘Melanie has had a disturbed night. Althea was exhausted so I sent her to bed around dawn and took over here.’

  ‘Oh!’ Instant concern for Melanie had her moving towards him on legs that were trembling with nervous tension. ‘Someone should have come for me!’ she protested as she peered worriedly at the baby.

  ‘I was here.’ That was all he said, yet it seemed to say it all. For he handled the baby girl as if he had been doing it all her little life. It was, in fact, the talk of the house how good he was with the baby. Claire already knew he spent time with her sister every morning before he left for Athens, and the same in the evening when he got home again.

  Bonding was the modern term for it, and Claire supposed it described what Andreas had been doing since Melanie had arrived in his life.

  ‘What has been the matter with her?’ she asked now.

  He smiled that brief smile—wry, though, not grim. ‘I have been reliably informed by the experienced Lefka that babies do have restless nights.’

  Claire nodded knowingly, her fingertips already stroking Melanie’s cheek without even realising she was doing it. ‘She hardly slept at all after Mother died,’ she confided sadly. ‘You wouldn’t think someone so young could know, but I think she missed her dreadfully.’

  ‘As you do?’

  Her throat thickened at the gentle question. She answered it with another nod. ‘I’ll take her now, if you like,’ she offered. ‘Then you can go and get some rest …’

  But even as she reached o
ut to take the baby from him Andreas caught hold of her fingers.

  The very fact that he was touching her was enough to bring the panic back. Her tension suddenly soared. Yet, though he had to feel it, he grimly ignored it. ‘She is happy with us, Claire,’ he said urgently. ‘You must be able to see that?’

  Which meant what? she wondered. That Melanie had never been happy with only her sister taking care of her?

  As usual, he read her thoughts. ‘No.’ He renounced them. ‘You misunderstand me. You have both been grieving—both of you, Claire. And although I know you may not be prepared to accept this right now you have both been happier in my care!’

  She knew what he was saying. She knew exactly what it was he was getting at. He wanted her to agree to stay without him having to exert undue pressure on her. He wanted her to go on as before as if last night had never happened.

  As if nothing had changed.

  ‘Give this a chance,’ he pleaded huskily. ‘Give me a second chance to make this work for us—if only for Melanie’s sake …’

  For Melanie’s sake. If this organ throbbing thickly in her breast was still a heart, she mused heavily, then she would have that phrase engraved on it.

  I did this—for Melanie’s sake.

  She gave one last nod of her head in mute acquiescence.

  It was enough. He let go of her fingers and silently offered her the baby. Melanie snuffled then settled into her arms. Andreas stood up, looking taller, leaner, darker in his all-white tracksuit. He was about to step around her so that she could sit down when he paused, touched her pale cheek with a gentle finger, and murmured, ‘Thank you.’

  Then he was gone, quickly, beating a hasty retreat now he had what he wanted.

  Which wasn’t Claire, she told herself in dull mockery.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT WAS a retreat that had in fact taken him right out of the firing line, Claire discovered when she eventually emerged from the sanctuary of the nursery which had turned out to be no sanctuary at all in the end.